Whomever I love, however I love them, whether they sleep in my bed or not, or whether I do homework with them or share a child with them, “love is love.” And I love our modern family. Maybe, in the end, a modern family is just a more honest family.
The day will come when a celebrity will announce they’re gay, or lesbian, or bisexual…and the response will be “So??”. People will love who they love for their own reasons and nary an eyebrow will be raised. Clearly, we have a ways to go before we’re there, but as increasingly numbers of celebrities become more open about their sexuality, people find themselves thinking about their own sexuality and prejudices. There’s no reason why the sexuality of a celebrity is of any more import than yours or mine, but our culture is obsessed with celebrity, so when a well-known person comes out, it’s news. Perhaps some day soon such news will elicit a collective yawn.
Maria Bello’s disclosure that she’s in a lesbian relationship came in a piece she wrote for the New York Times. She discusses her journey and how she finally came to find herself in a romantic relationship with her best friend. She writes about how she struggled with telling her son…only to find out that her son loves her for who she is and not who she loves. Sometimes, all a love one wants from you is honesty.
Any version of sexuality other than the majority’s “norm” can be, and often is, a source of great consternation and stress. Ultimately, though, the heart wants what it wants; we can accept it and grow or fight it and be miserable. In Bello’s case, she reached the conclusion that what was right for her wasn’t an issue to those around her who love her for who she is, not who shares her bed. I think we can all take a lesson from that. We are who we are, we love who we love, and if we can see our way clear to accept that for what it is, we might just find something resembling happiness…and Lord knows that can be in short supply these days.
Perhaps someday the question of who and how we love will be of far less importance than that we do love. With any luck, maybe we’ll begin to consider a person’s happiness to be worthy of greater consideration than the gender of who shares their life and/or their bed. Of course, there will always be those who judge and hate those who live and/or love differently than what they consider “moral” or “appropriate.” They’re free to live and love (or not) as they see fit. If they define love as one man-one woman and only in the missionary position, that’s their prerogative…but it doesn’t give them the right to judge those who prefer their lives to be not quite so narrowly defined.
I hope that I’ll live long enough to see a world in which people can be who they are and love whom they choose. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone came out…and no one so much as looked up from their iPad? Because in the end, happiness is all that should really matter.
I think it’s true; “a modern family is just a more honest family.” And that honesty can still be hard to come by. I hope I’ll see the day when all that matters is love and honesty.
That will be a great day.
